


i ain't holy, i ain't close

by queenofthestarrrs



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim (2013)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-16 05:42:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12336615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofthestarrrs/pseuds/queenofthestarrrs
Summary: The end of the world feels like home.





	i ain't holy, i ain't close

The day the Kaiju attack, Newt feels a certain sense of peace. 

 

It feels like home. It feels like putting on his worn, threadbare MIT shirt from his undergrad days and climbing into bed snuggled up beneath one of his mother’s old quilts. It feels like hot coffee and a warm wash of golden sunlight while The Kooks play on an easy Sunday morning.  It feels like empty streets and full labs and the sound of worn boots against the pavement.

 

It’s part two of the end of the goddamn world, and Newt has never felt more at home. 

 

-

Sometimes, in the long nights, he dreams in a world tinged in blue.    
  
He is sitting in his childhood home. His father is laughing as he carefully flips pancakes for breakfast. The room smells sweet, like warmed maple syrup that he smuggled in his suitcase from Toronto to Berlin. His uncle’s voice, deep and harmonic, drifts in from the living room. Newt’s hand, small and calloused, reach out for the tattered volumes of  _ FullMetal Alchemist  _ that we’re left open on counter. 

  
He is sitting in a home that he has never stepped a foot into. He is sitting with his sister. She’s braiding her hair  in an elaborate updo while an American boy band plays in the background. His hip hurts, a stinging pain that radiates from his toes to the base of his skull. He leans heavily on her plush bed. The room is thick with hairspray as she hums along. They are sitting in near silence with nothing but history and fondness between them. 

 

He is dying. He is dying and panicking and he cannot find his child and everything hurts. He can feel the smoke irritating his eyes, filling up his lungs. He watches as the carnage around him. He watches his blood, bright blue and toxic, spill out onto the concrete. He looks out into the sea and only sees a world of gray.    
  
Newt always wakes up from these dreams, grasping for a phantom body next to him. His mouth tastes like ammonia.

 




 

He embraces the swagger, probably more than he should.    
  
He updates his wardrobe. He slicks back his hair. He gets new glasses. He trades his worn out sneakers for polished leather. He spends more time with his tattoos covered up and his buttons done up in the few months he hits the lecture circuit than he did during his entire tenure with the PPDC. He takes a seemingly endless series of pictures with Mako, all asymmetrical bob, red lipstick, and confidence, which grace the covers of magazines and newspapers across the globe. 

 

He becomes sleek lines and and seeks to be as cool as chrome. 

 

He likes it, swears up and down that he does. After all, he always said he was going to be a rockstar scientist, and now he finally is. He saved the entire goddamn world. He deserves to bask in the light, the admiration, the love, the everything that was denied to him as a child. He deserves it. 

 

He can’t help but smile when he steps on the stage in Massachusetts, the last stop on the tour. He walks out on the stage, beaming. He strides arm and arm, with a straight faced Mako.The roar of the crowd at MIT is practically deafening with thousands of sets of shiny undergrad eyes staring at them in admiration. They take a few moments to greet the crowds, all soft waves and small bows. 

 

(There is a small voice again. It speaks to him in German, pulling him out of the moment and nearly causing him to stumble. It asks him if he has considered the costs. Has he asked himself how many people have died, how many families were torn apart, to allow him to stand here and smile?) 

 

They’re half-way through their shared talk when he feels a searing pain in the base of his skull. There is a deafening ring, and before he knows it, he’s half slumped in Mako’s arms as she nearly drags him away. The stage manager, a petite woman with a thick black braid, looks at him in horror. He nearly asks her why, but he opens his mouth to feel the metallic drip of blood into his mouth.    
  
He can still smell the sharp coppery smell and the warm wetness on his cheek as Mako escorts him back to his room. She stays long enough for his eye to stop bleeding and leaves silently as he washes himself in the bathroom. 

 

Newt hears the door click and gets to work. He rolls up his sleeves to meticulous wash away the crusted blood. He combs through his hair. And then he just stands there.    
  
His bloodshot eye and stained clothes and colorful skin standing alone in an empty hotel room feel like the most authentic thing he’s been in months. 

 

-

 

Sex, during the apocalypse, is an experience. 

 

The second time around he fully embraces life in the Shatterdome. He embraces the excessiveness of it all. Longer hours, bigger machines, copious amounts of indulgence. After all, he’s started down the apocalypse, sheer death, and gave it a solid “Whatever, man.” 

 

He flirts his way through night after night until the days start to blend together. Sex, sleep, eat, work, eat, sex, sleep. 

 

He’s with a girl one night or morning, he genuinely can’t tell. She’s a soft spoken engineer, younger than he is, with a big blue eyes and a listing moan. She laughed at his jokes, split a few beers, and suggested he followed her back to her room. He does. 

  
He likes her well enough. It’s fine, the sex is. But he can’t keep his vision straight. The room is spinning, and his vision starts to blur. He closes his eyes and tries to ground himself in physical sensation, the coolness of the air on his skin, the feeling of her nails in his back. 

 

He opens his eyes and panics to see a girl he doesn’t recognize beneath him. She looks at him with deep, searching brown eyes. Her tightly coiled hair spreads out across the pillow. Her breasts, large, and perky, and warm graze against his chest. She looks at him with more love he thought was possible.    
  
“Hermann,” she whispers in English tinged by a whiff of a Nigerian accent.    
  
Newt snaps his eyes shut.    
  
“Are you okay?” He opens his eyes to the engineer grasping his bicep. “You stopped for a second.”    
  
He swallows and nods, willing himself to continue again. He shuts his eyes again. 

 

He opens them again to stare at a bony collarbone. He can feel a slight frame beneath him, and the raised bumps of scar tissue pressing into his hip. He listens to shallow breathing and muttered words in German. He can feel heat rising in face.    
  
“I need to leave,” Newt practically shrieks as he snaps his eyes closed again. He blindly rolls off the bed, slips on his pants, and runs out the door. 

 

It feels like he’s been running forever when he finally gets to his room and collapses in his bed. When he heads to sleep that night, he tells himself to forget what he had seen moments before.   
  


-

  
“Newt.”    
  
He turns around to see Hermann across the room. A small smile is gracing his face, and his stare, all bright eyes framed by sharp face, is persistent.    
  
He stands rigidly, feeling like his stomach dropped, as if he had been hit by lightning. Newt was wrong, wrong the whole time. This felt both like an adventure and like coming home more than anything else he had felt before in his life.    
  
“Welcome back.” 


End file.
